


A Little Piece of Rope

by ordinarily (tofty), tofty



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-05-12
Updated: 2009-05-12
Packaged: 2017-10-15 09:41:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/159516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tofty/pseuds/ordinarily, https://archiveofourown.org/users/tofty/pseuds/tofty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Roll for maximum damage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Little Piece of Rope

**Author's Note:**

> A coda for "When the Levee Breaks."

He never got it before. After Stanford, and before, too, Sam would sit sullen in the passenger seat after a hunt, leaving a town, cops and angry (and usually a couple of grateful) citizens snapping at the Impala’s rims, and Dean would feel Sam’s exhausted silence slicing through the car like a machete at a vampire’s throat, brutal and efficient and cutting through his own giddy adrenaline roll with a swipe that left him silent too, bloody in the abrupt aftermath. Because Dean could hear it through the silence: I hate this life. And it wasn’t unexpected – he’d grown up with Sam, after all, and wasn’t blind, besides, regardless of what Sam has always seemed to think – but it was shocking. Dean was shocked by that antipathy, every time. Every time, the hurt flashed through him as though this were new to him. Were news.

And Dean’s life was the hunt, was his family, so, yeah, he was bound to get mixed up about that, was bound to feel the hunt’s blood on him, was bound to see Sam’s various escapes as escapes from Dad and the hunt and him, too, all of that, and that was even before Sam came right out and said it. _You’re going to have to let me go_ , he said. Well, Dean’s been trying to do that with good grace, okay, all his life, and failing at it; he was never good at letting go, not like Sam, not even when everything he ever held onto struggled to get away. And if it never got easier to let go – and it’s never gotten any easier – it also never got easier to watch the struggle.

That year after he made the deal, both of them counting down, Sam was angry and desperate and struggling in the opposite direction from his usual struggles, but for a long time, the longest time, he didn’t understand that what he was seeing might somehow be permanently damaging Sam, because Sam, he knew how to get to running so fast that escape velocity was sort of inevitable, which Dean had never been able to master that skill. And he figured this time would be no different, that Sam would be sent spinning, but that once he got to spinning he’d spin right back into the life he’d once planned for himself, would remember Dean as both the anchor and the gigantic pain in the ass that he always had been, but just get on with everything, the way he always had. In a lot of ways, it didn’t even look any different: Sam, angry and afraid after the deal, looked a lot like Sam, angry and afraid and already half out of the game and on his way to California.

Dean hadn’t really thought about what escaping meant, though. Not really, because before last year, he’d never got so far as to act on the urge before. That to escape, you need something to escape from. That to see yourself in opposition to something, or someone, you need to keep that thing around to give yourself perspective. He’d never known that all those times Sam had yanked himself out of Dean’s orbit, he’d been setting himself in another orbit in response to Dean’s gravitational pull. He’d never known that, and it’s possible that Sam had known it and equally possible that he hadn’t, but either way, it seems clear now, with Sam’s handprints at his throat and his muffled footsteps not even echoing down the carpeted hall, gone without a word, the silence as loud as it ever was, that this was the case. And that without that subtle pull, Sam went spinning out of anything so tidy and predictable as an orbit, and that by the time Dean was back, he’d been too far away to feel it. That even if he’d wanted to get back – and maybe he really did, Dean wants so badly to believe it he can almost make it there through sheer effort of will – he couldn’t find the way.

He never got that before, but looking at the wreckage of the hotel room, of Sam’s life and his, he thinks he might get it now.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Kate Bush's "Love and Anger."


End file.
